Defending Your Statistics in Court

There is nothing worse than presenting research findings to an audience predisposed to hate it. Maybe you’ve had that experience of being in a boardroom of hostile managers? They don’t like what you’re about to say, so they pick at every methodological decision, shifting focus away from the story that the data have to tell. It is one reason I left the world of academia not so long ago.

But what if you were hired to play that very game, and you’ve got the expertise to win? It can be exhilarating, which is why research to support litigation can be satisfying work. “We know this stuff inside and out,” I tell our team. “Just be ready, with the authority we have, to speak to every detail of the research.”

Those details are nicely summarized in the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, compiled by the Federal Judicial Center and the National Research Council. Several months back we described the section on Survey Research, which focuses on survey design and sampling. Here we offer an overview of the 91-page Statistics section.

If nothing else, this outline (shown verbatim from the section’s Table of Contents) offers a nice primer on everything one needs to know about statistics to do credible quantitative market research: